The Devil’s Blood – The Time of No Time Evermore

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Immediately following the release of this album The Devil’s Blood became the must-have band for European Summer festivals in 2010, quickly being booked for several major events, as well as a headlining Spring tour. Instrumental intro The Time of No Time takes a little over a minute to really start, but once it does the lead guitar shows particularly strong elements of early Rainbow, which continues in Evermore, one of the album’s strongest tracks. The Devil’s Blood spend about half of the album sounding like a new version of Coven, but the other half like a female-fronted version of Wolfmother, which might prove a little too trendy for some. Certainly if this was what Blackmore’s Night had sounded like they would probably have had a lot fewer complaints from rock fans, and they have penned a great collection of songs (the acoustic folk of Angel’s Prayer, for instance), but there’s a bit too much indie-rock influence in some of the rhythm guitar for the rock arena, where their subject matter has probably contributed to their popularity. The level of radio-friendliness in songs like I’ll Be Your Ghost and Queen of My Burning Heart feels quite high, in between the stellar vocals, Satanic lyrics and excellent lead guirar of course, and were the radio ever to give them a chance (they probably won’t), seeing them prove very successful with the teenage Guitar Hero crowd wouldn’t be too surprising. That said, there is a lot of good music here, particularly Evermore, Angel’s Prayer, House of 1,000 Voices and the first eight-and-a-half minutes of The Anti-Kosmik Magick (the rest is ambient outro), and Farida Lemouchi’s voice is magnificent, so with maybe a little more Circulus and a few less intentionally-quirky guitar riffs, a second album could very well be flawless.

Written by Andy Lye
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